1898-1993
Author and Minister

Simple Style.

A country boy from Ohio, Norman Vincent Peale trained at Boston University Seminary and began his full-time ministry at a church in Brooklyn in 1924. He married Ruth Stafford on 20 June 1930 and two years later accepted a call to the Dutch Reformed Marble Collegiate Church in New York, where he was soon attracting large crowds with his simple preaching style. He appealed to middle- and upper-middle-class Americans struggling to survive a Depression and two world wars.

Mid 1940s.

Before World War II Peale wrote The Art of Living (1937), which sold poorly but which announced the theme to which he would return in later books: "applied Christianity helps people to tap [the] reservoir of power within themselves." In the mid 1940s Peale began a newsletter called Guideposts, which offered anecdotes and inspirational accounts of faith in action. It soon achieved a...